The disaster of the Russian military Tu-154 – a few short first thoughts (UPDATED)

It is too early to conclude what happened with this aircraft, but since I have been asked about this by email, here are my own, personal and provisional, thoughts:

Mechanical failure: unlikely. The Tu-154 is a three engine aircraft and an extremely strong beast. It’s safety record is comparable to most aircraft of its time, even though it was often used in extreme conditions other aircraft types did not have to operate in. The Tu-154 had already taken enough altitude to attempt a return to base or even a water landing. The weather that day was good. Besides, the crew did not communicate any problem. Thus the disaster had to be instantaneous.

Fuel problem: unlikely. Fuel problems are always a prime suspect when a crash occurs, but even if the engines had suddenly experienced problems or even a full shutdown, the pilots would have had the time to report this. Also, like any other aircraft, the Tu-154 can glide and maneuver without power.

Bird strike: unlikely. I am not even sure that there have ever been a triple engine failure due to a bird strike but even if there has been, they crew could have reported it which it did not. And, again, the case of US Airways flight 1549 has shown that even a catastrophic birdstrike does not prevent a fully loaded airliner from attempting to land.

Pilot error: highly unlikely. The guys flying this aircraft where extremely experienced and while human error is always possible, it mostly results in situation were it can be reported. The Tu-154 was a very complex aircraft to operate and it had its weaknesses – but these were all very well known to the Russian crews and this crew was a very experienced one.

Missile: unlikely. The Tu-154 has three engines including one mounted over the top of the rear of the fuselage and a MANPAD type missile warhead does not have the kind of blast radius capable of taking out all three of them. As for bigger missiles, the Black Sea coasts of Russia is very tightly controlled by the Russian military and security services (as is the entire Black Sea) and to get that close to the city of Sochi would be risky and difficult.

Sabotage/bomb: most likely simply because all other causes are even less likely. True, this was a military aircraft with, supposedly, good security. Alas, I can confirm from personal experience that if you look Russian and speak Russian like a native and if you act the right way, military security in Russia is nowhere near as good as it should be. However, if you speak with an accent or look foreign, and that includes speaking with a Caucasian accent or looking like somebody from the Caucasus, you would have a much harder time beating the controls.

For all these reasons and even though it is way too early to speculate, my of preferred hypothesis is that it was a terrorist act executed by Ukrainian operatives. I hope that I am wrong and that I will be proven wrong in the next 24 hours but at this point in time, this appears to me as the most likely scenario.

One more thing: this tragedy really breaks my heart. Not only did the entire Alexandrov Ensemble perish, but two amazing personalities were on board: Valerii Khalilolv and “Dr Liza“. There are no words to express the loss which the death of all these people represents for Russia. This is why I hope and pray that in spite of why first reaction outlined above, this is not a Ukrainian terrorist attack because if it is, the consequences will be very severe. We should know more very soon.

The Saker

UPDATE: according to Russian sources the voice recorder of the Tu-154 indicates some kind of emergency malfunction of the aircraft’s wing flaps. If this information is confirmed by the data flight recorder and the Russian experts then this is not a terrorist attack. If so, I am immensely relieved in my sadness. The Saker

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241 Comments

I have a question that may or may not be related to this tragedy. I have always wondered about this and it may even read as naive but I’m going to ask it anyways.

Is there a gauge, dial, readout, etc., somewhere in the cockpit instrumentation panel of a Russian aircraft that displays the gross weight as the passengers board it and cargo is stowed and secured away?

It seems to me a heavyweight scale could be built in the tarmac at each departure gate and transmit the weight wirelessly to the cockpit, that way the pilot doesn’t have to “guesstimate” the maximum takeoff mass.

PokeTheTruth, to my knowledge, there are no on-board instruments that report weight. The best way would be to somehow install calibrated strain-gauges on the landing gear which would give a weight readout. However, that would make them a flight-critical item that would have to be double or triple replicated for safety. Failure of these devices would also put the aircraft out-of-service until the mechanics fixed them. I am afraid that ‘management’ would see them as a profit-reducer rather than a life-saver…

Also, to my knowledge, there are only scale-based weight-checks after heavy-maintenance or modifications in the shops. This is done both to get a new empty-weight ‘baseline’ and to check for center-of-gravity shifts (important for control-ability). After that, all fuel and passenger weights are registered by a paper-trail and summed for gross-weight and cg position.

Roll-over scales at airports are a great idea. Unfortunately, they run-into the same ‘management’ issues as above. Management has their own private jets, so they don’t worry about saving their own lives with those scales…

I expect there is a flight manifest prepared with estimated weight for passengers and cargo and the weight of on board fuel should be known. In winter at night with a 50% passenger load and near sea level airfield one would think the aircraft was well under its limit and that the crew would know what the load was.

I’ve flown in helicopters for the USFS where the manifest was done for each flight and all passengers and cargo weighed. In Russia in the early 90s I flew in an Mi-8 helicopter where the pilots pulled a static hover, checked turbine temperature, off-loaded some passengers, and took off using ground effect till they got enough forward speed to get fully airborne (on a paved runway).

Probably another score for Ash Carter. He delivers on his promise to down Russian planes. It’s the third one plus fighter jet. What next they will come with. Public realizes are just for the public consumption.

Within a few weeks at most the cause of the disaster will probably be revealed by the black box recordings. My bet, not that I am a gambler, is human error. In most air accidents human error is the most common cause. All pilots, even the most experienced, being fallible human beings are prone to errors.

Sorry, but it was not ‘pilot error’. If the flaps failed shortly after takeoff, the pilots could not have done anything to prevent the crash. Their only ‘options’ (if they could react in the seconds available) were to stay in the post-stall condition and hit the water slightly nose-up, or to push the nose over and hit the water in a semi-dive. Neither were survivable. It was NOT ‘pilot error’…

“Many experts note that the nature of the fragments and their dispersal over long distances say speak of an explosion on board. For example, the rack chassis was found in the water. This part of the plane retracts immediately after take-off and remains in the gondola during the flight. Was there something in the gondola that caused the landing gear of the aircraft to separate?

Strangely enough, the plane belonged to the Russian Defence Ministry, and the passengers of the aircraft were not common passengers. They were actually well-known individuals in Russia. Who could plant a bomb in the plane? Was it like in Sharm el-Sheikh? The Chkalovsky airfield in the Moscow region is known as a well-protected military facility, where it is impossible to take a bomb on board a plane.

The airport in Sochi is an airport of dual use, where the level of protection is higher than at other conventional airports.

Here is an opinion from pilot-instructor Andrei Krasnoperov. “I had flown from Chkalovsky airfield to the east. There was no inspection at all, and the level of security there is much worse than at civilian airports,” Krasnoperov said.

If this was a terrorist attack, it comes well into line with the killing of Russian Ambassador to Turkey. It also matches John Kirby’s remarks, who said that Russia would lose more planes if it was not going to stop operations in Syria.

Noteworthy, disabled transponders and communication systems can be explained as follows. French reconnaissance ship Dupuy de Lome had entered the Black Sea on the eve of the tragedy. The ship can send a strong impulse to deactivate all electronic equipment on board the aircraft. Israel resorts to this practice against Russian airplanes in Syria. It was reported that the bodies of the victims of the Tu-154 crash were wearing life jackets. Therefore, the crew had time to warn the passengers, but not the flight control officers. In this is the case, then this is a war against NATO, rather than an act of terrorism.

There is another question: what was the need to send a military ensemble to the war-torn country, where tens of thousands of terrorists and their mentors from NATO still long for vengeance? Are we complacent about the war in Syria? Have we won and defeated everyone? One could hear it both from the president, who said that Russia was stronger than any aggressor, and from the Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Defence and Security Viktor Ozerov, who said a few hours after the tragedy that the version of a terrorist attack was excluded”.

I recall having read (in a discussion of 9-11) that nearly all commercial airplanes have a backdoor program allowing their controls to be over-ridden and steered from the ground. Supposedly is was to enable them to be landed safely if the pilot(s) died while in the air. (Significantly, Israel’s airline will not fly these).

This is not much different from the modern automobiles that can be remotely hijacked and crashed.

Talks-to-Cats, that ‘ability’ is indeed the case. It has been gradually built-up in Boeing and Airbus autopilots for all the ‘right’ reasons. Unfortunately, this capability also allows for ‘negative-usage’ as well..

I consider Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 to have been ‘hijacked’ by this means. I consider GermanWings Flight 9525 to have been ‘steered’ into a mountainside by this means. There are several other ‘anomaly’ crashes which could be ‘autopilot takeover’ situations.

All that being said, the Tu-154 crash being an ‘autopilot takeover’ situation would depend on a Soviet-era autopilot. The accident aircraft was probably of 1980s vintage. So was its original autopilot. (Whether the Russians had ‘state-of-the-art’ autopilots retrofitted into that particular aircraft is unknown.) So, this particular aircraft may have been ‘immune’ to outside takeover just due to near-obsolescence. It may even have had ‘hard-wired’ flight controls, rather than fancy electronics-based flight controls. (Which is very good, imho. Ever seen “Battlestar Galactica”?)

On the other hand, the Tu-154’s ‘details’ are well-known due to its age. If there were a way to ‘inject’ a signal to mess something up, this would be known…

Any aircraft with flaps can have a “flaps problem”. This can have very serious consequences, especially if something goes wrong close to the ground. But a “flaps problem” is not an issue restricted solely to this design. If something serious goes wrong with the flaps when you need them most, then it matters not whether the aircraft is of Russian, European, American or British origin, you are in it bad! As my flight instructor used to say, “you will be having not a good day’s flying today.”

The design of this aircraft is well proved. It has been around for an extended period of time and its flight characteristics, strengths and weaknesses are well understood. It is a trusted design.

I hate to make ill informed guesses about what was the root cause of crashes such as this one. There is so little solid technical information available about it to me right now. So, conclude that it is always best to wait until the results of the crash investigation are published (and I hope they are). Don’t forget that such investigations are carried out by professionals with profound technical knowledge and understanding. They have the specialist training and experience in how to locate the causes of these disasters from utterly smashed up remains that they get to view and analyse. Think on how difficult that must be to accomplish. There is generally not much intact after an aircraft goes down. Yet they work on the little they have and most often come up with important answers. My respect for them is to let them do a very difficult and trying task. Let’s wait and see what they say.

There is another possibility: electronic interference or remote control highjack. If this is true (see Pravda English edition), this is not a terrorist act, it is an act of war from… NATO. there are many NATO ships in the area… According to Abel Danger website, all western planes now have a special irreversible automatic pilot highjack system in place for ‘safety reasons’, however Tupolev is made in Russia, but if they fly to western airports they’re probably obliged to adopt security measure standards and that might might be it. I can’t but bring to my mind the incident of the Tupolev bomber and the US naval ship that was entirely ‘silenced’.

“Bainetov said that the Tu-154’s last flight was only 70 seconds long. It climbed to about 250 meters and flew at a speed of 360 to 370 km/h before plunging into water.”

That last para gives an idea about how little time the crew would have had once they knew they had a problem. 360kmh is about 60km per second. At 250 m height, that would leave them only a few seconds time to try and recover, depending on the steepness of the angle of fall.

I think you mean that 360 km/hr is about 6 km/minute (about 100 m/second). Your conclusion that a mere 250 m above the ground/sea leaves not much time to react surely is right.

We can appreciate the importance of Goshawk’s comment, “No pilot engages in radical maneuvers just post-takeoff. Every pilot is aware that a stall just post-takeoff is immediate death.”

There is not only the lack of time to react and recover but think on what happens to aircraft structures and to people when they collide with the ground or sea at velocities ~100m/sec or thereabouts. The deceleration is immense. The forces involved are orders of magnitude above what is survivable.

vot tak, your comment about “only a few seconds time to try and recover” brought up a related scenario:

Most takeoffs from non-noise sensitive runways (like this one) simply put the engines to maximum thrust, rotate, and leave the engines at maximum thrust for climb-out purposes. The flaps are retracted along-the-way as soon as the aircraft has reached an airspeed where the clean-wing would not stall, with the engines still producing maximum thrust. (The maximum thrust is left-on because of the old pilot’s maxim: “The two most useless things are runway behind you and altitude above you.”)

Now, if the flaps were commanded to retract BUT failed to retract (or went-up slightly and jammed) with the engines at full thrust, the aircraft could have accelerated to where the flaps were beyond their limit-loads within seconds. The crew would have had only seconds to note the failure and put the aircraft into a non-accelerating mode.

Modern jet aircraft are particularly vulnerable to this ‘situation’, because jet-engine thrust is only controlled by fuel flow; so, some inherent ‘delay’ is built into the system. Even if you chopped the throttles, there would be a few seconds delay in thrust-reduction – a delay added-to by the rotational inertia of the compressor and turbine assembly in the engine. (This is why fighter pilots attempting a carrier landing leave their engines at high thrust and deploy speed-brakes. If a ‘bolter’ happens when an arresting-cable is missed or breaks, the pilot can retract the speed-brakes almost instantly and attempt a go-around.)

So, an unexpected flap ‘non-retraction’ could have been very dangerous at maximum thrust. (The crew might have had a chance with some kind of speed-brake deployment, but most airliners do not have them. Also, spoilers on the wing are often ‘locked out’ above a certain airspeed.) The flaps may have been in ‘overload’ condition before acceleration was neutralized. Break-up would ensue. The subsequent ‘pitch-up’ scenario would fit-in with my comments above.

Again, the only variable – which we may never truthfully know – is whether the flap-malfunction was age-induced or was ‘helped-along’ via human intervention…

Your assumptions are logical. The “news” about voices “damning the flaps” were denied, since no
voice recording was possible on that analysed “black box”. The urgent denials of “terrorist
attack” by the authorities of RF , directly from Transport Minister Sokolov, were presented
before even the first aircraft segment was fished out! It appears, that Russians are extinguishing
the lit fuse, which was ignited to prompt their strong, similar counter action, which could serve
as an excuse for the US./western attack on Russia.
Let’s not forget that the catastrophe occurred a few kms from US. controlled Georgia. Maybe
it could be researched if the DoD of RF before Shojgu purchased or was offered amazing
Boeing/Honeywell “uninterruptible autopilot”, which could control the plane from the ground,
no matter what the crew is performing; there are other modern ways to destroy the plane,
beside the coke can with explosives.

Phew must admit I breathed a sigh of relief at the end of this excellent article. The flaps could have been sabotaged mind you if the airport is as bad as pointed out in the piece. Let`s all hope it turns out to be just a very bad accident which do of course happen with things mechanical but I am doubtful . Some of the Western press has had a mocking tone in their write ups and to my mind this is disgraceful and deserves reprimand.

The easiest and most reliable way to sabotage a plain in mid-flight is to manipulate the “elevator” control surfaces.

It is important to understand that any fixed-wing aircraft has a minimum “stall speed” that must be maintained to ensure that the wings produce enough lift. Below the stall speed, the airflow around the wings is disrupted and the aircraft goes into a “death spiral.”

It is theoretically possible to recover from a stall, but this requires functioning control surfaces.

Manipulating FLAPS (which are used to heighten the wing profile for take-off and landing) can have a similar effect in that it changes the nose-tail balance of the airframe in flight.

AILERONS (control surfaces at trailing end of the wing one which are raised or lowered in counter-symmetry to “roll” the aircraft around its longitudinal axis) could also be manipulated to make the aircraft uncontrollable.

Lastly, reverse thrust could be applied to induce a drastic loss of forward velocity. Normally, aircraft have special security mechanisms to avoid reverse thrust being engaged when the aircraft is in flight. However, these mechanisms could have been disabled by a saboteur.

I am not convinced that this flight was not a terrorist attack. It is easy enough for the CIA to have equipment that will malfunction a plane to insure it appears like a technical malfunction.
I am not convinced such coincidences such as the assassination of the Russian Ambassador & this plane crash are not related operations.

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